AOTC and ROTS also didn’t look as bad then as they do now since they’ve aged poorly. Scenes like the Coruscant opening weren’t ridiculed for how bad they looked at the time.
I thought it looked bad in the theaters and I was in the fifth grade. Nothing else in the prequels looked bad to me at the time (although I didnt like them nearly as much as the OT) but even my simple fifth grade mind wondered whY return of the jedi made in 1983 had A better looking space battle than this new movie.